DTC, that is, Deep Thinking about Christianity, or some such similar thing, is a series of nontechnical posts that contain my responses to the biggest intellectual challenges to Christianity. As I explain in the preface, I hope that both naturalists and believers will benefit from this series. The Introduction contains a prospective outline.
From the beginning of Christian theology, the being of God has been so thoroughly revered that actually making descriptive statements about Him was difficult. It is easy to say what God is not, but what is he? The way I think about it is this: the Christian God is singular—He is entirely unique. There is absolutely nothing like Him, even remotely. We do not have any way of gaining knowledge that is solid enough to constitute a grounding for knowledge of Him. Things that we can understand are not like God, because God is singular. In light of this, perhaps it is more, or only, appropriate to make apophatic statements about God: statements that deny things about God. At least, that’s the typical story. Why then, if the Bible contains both apophatic and cataphatic (positive) statements about God, would Christians so limit themselves?
Surprisingly, this isn’t just a Christian problem. Part of what is so compelling about apophatic theology is its long history. While the most definitive statement of apophatic theology is probably from Maimonides in the 12th century, the core idea goes back at least to Plato, and probably to the Presocratics Parmenides and Heraclitus. It’s about as old as any recorded theological concept. Sure, in the Judeo-Christian tradition God’s very holiness suggests that only apophatic statements about being may be rightly made; however, applying apophatic thinking to divinity is, apparently, a natural approach to thinking about divinity in general.
There is something rather intuitive about this sort of theology-by-negation in light of what we have discussed up to this point. If the divine is definitionally “that which we cannot comprehend”, then of course, it would be easier to know what the divine isn’t rather than what it is. After all, according to the definitions we adopted at the beginning of this chapter, the divine isn’t understandable. Still, the question we have been working on remains:
Can we discover something about the divine based on the very fact of existence itself or from its nature?
It is tempting to try to lessen the distance between the divine and the finite in various relatively direct ways. Perhaps we can make arguments of various kinds that help us understand the divine. Perhaps this is exactly what religion is trying to accomplish in the first place; reaching out with our whole persons to grasp at the transcendent. If we accept this about religion, it might be a natural turn in our exploration of this question to actually explore the arguments and claims of various religions. However, this would present us with a properly immense task; this is the task that we will partially take up for Christianity in the later parts of this series. Presently, arguing for one religion or another would primarily distract from the current line of reasoning.
Instead of trying to overcome this distance directly, as religions may purport to do, it would be prudent to try to find some additional connection between the divine and the finite. At this stage, there is one promising lead: being itself. While we cannot predicate anything in particular about the divine, we have reason to think that being is at least caused by the divine and is rightly called “divine”. Although a mere play on words at this stage, it does seem right to call the cause of being itself a “divine being”, as the activity of “being” is all that we know of whatever “it” is, and being is the best candidate for the title “divine”, as it is the abstract concept behind the mysteriousness that both metaphysical realists and physicalists tend to acknowledge as the more fundamental thing beyond the limits of our (current) understanding. At least, that’s my argument so far.
In this way, I find divine being to be actually implied by what we claim to know about reality itself. Why is reality the way that it is? Why does it exist at all? What is it? This mystery about reality, about being itself, is rightly called divine. However, we ourselves also exist. We also have being.
It is precisely this mystery that glimmers in the space of all ideas as a thread of connection between the finite and the infinite.
Oh, right: the history lesson. The most notable promoter of the notion that “being” is the thread between divinity and nature was none other than Thomas Aquinas. While he arrived at the theory through other paths of reasoning, Thomas is credited for initially articulating the analogia entis: “the analogy of being”. To understand what he meant, it is helpful to consider the medieval scholasticism around the idea. Even with a robust understanding of such, as the debates between the great Reformed theologian Karl Barth and the great Catholic theologian Erich Przywara demonstrated, there can exist much controversy around the idea amongst the various strains of the Christian tradition. The nature of their disagreement and the role of the analogia entis in Reformed belief is an ongoing study in some respects, although I think it is clear that the debate boiled down to deeper disconnects between Catholics and Protestants on the relationship between God and creation, especially mankind. God’s immanence is not necessarily a comforting idea.
In any case, it is crucial that we understand the analogy of being correctly if we are to unravel this thread any further. Let’s begin by asking the simple question, “What sorts of relationships exist between things?” in order to answer the more pertinent question, “What relationship exists between the being that transcends the material substrate, and that of our own being?”
We might start by imagining a hypothetical sort of relationship: the non-relationship. In this case, our being is one sort of thing, and the divine being is another sort of thing entirely. This approach would overlook the way we reached the concept of divine being in the first place, discovering it organically at the extent of possible human reasoning. If this non-relationship were the case, we simply would never conceive of divine being in the first place.
There exist relations where something is held in common between two things; for example, an apple tree and an orange tree are both rightly called “trees”, and they are related by their both being trees. This may be called a relationship of “type”.
There also exist relations between two things that are unequal; for example, bark is a part of a tree. The bark and the tree are related in that the former is a part, a dependent component (not necessary), of the latter. Thus, we may call this a dependent relationship.
There are also relations involving a component that is necessary to the existence of the constituent object; for example, wood is a (necessary) part of a tree. Thus, this is called a necessary relationship.
There also exist relations that are analogous; a family tree is analogously related to real trees, as it does not possess actual existence as a tree; rather, it has only the image of or likeness of a tree. This is the analogical relationship.
The first option doesn’t seem likely, as it doesn’t fit with our findings so far, namely, that there is some sort of relationship between our existence and the divine existence.
We might be tempted to choose the second option: Both ourselves and the divine have being in common, as if we both participate in the same sort of existence. This makes some sense in our context, as we ourselves exist, and the divine is that which must exist; both have existence. However, the existence itself of the divine is beyond our understanding, as underlies the existence of reality itself. While we exist in reality, the divine existence is, somehow, not understandable at the base of reality. Careful consideration reveals that we cannot confidently predicate anything about the existence of the divine, even in saying that it has being in the same way that we have being. While this notion of being is indeed shared between us and the divine, to say that it is of the same type, that is, that the divine being and our own being are equal, seems too far a leap. Rather, divinity transcends our being, even if divinity has its own being.
The third sort of relationship is also tempting; we might want to say that there is a hierarchical relation (or dependency) between our being and that of the divine. We have being on the divine being, but our being is not necessary for the divine being to have its own being, just as bark is on the tree. It is very tempting to accept this relationship as well, as it seems that our existence in this universe is sort of on the divine existence, since the divine being somehow underlies existence as we know it. However, this concept still predicates that our being is of the same type as the divine being. The bark exists in the same sort of way that the tree exists. Given our argument so far, this would be beyond our ability to claim or understand of the divine. It doesn’t quite fit with how we’ve developed the concept of divinity thus far.
The fourth type of relationship makes an even bolder claim: that our existence is necessary to that of the divine. If we did not exist, the divine would not either. While the first two options seem plausible, and indeed may prove to be true with more knowledge, this option seems far less likely. I will admit that, in principle, there is some possibility of it being true; somehow, that which exists in the universe may be fundamentally part of, or necessary to, the existence of the divine, but at that point, it is hard to not simply call the our own existence divine. This option destroys the difference between our existence and that of the divine more than the other options do.
Finally, the fifth option. It does not immediately contradict our findings thus far. It maintains a tension between the enigmatic, mysterious nature of the divine, and the apparent commonality of existence between us and it. This is what Thomas Aquinas discovered was the best way to understand God’s relationship to man: the analogy of being.
If our being is but an analogy of the being of the divine, then it makes sense to continue our investigation by looking for additional facets of that analogy, additional aspects of being. The analogia entis provides us with a framework to seek knowledge of the divine on the basis of knowledge of our own existence, but we still have a long way to go to find an answer to our question: "What is God?" To progress further, we must consider another key concept from medieval theology: the transcendentals. In the next post, we will explore how we may apply the transcendentals in the framework we’ve developed so far, providing a prospective answer to our question: “What is god?”